heroiconesfandomcom-20200214-history
Stahlberg
Stahlberg Incorporated Stahlberg Inc. (ger. "Steel-Mountain") is an underground containment and enterprise information management facility, located in Hinterbühl in lower Austria, approx. 15 Kilometers southern of Vienna. It houses the back-up datacenters of HeroicOnes inc. as well as rare biological samples and experimentation records. Despite being a component of the S&P 500 Index, it's records are not available for public view, effectively rendering it a phantom company. History Background The project was started by Dr. Heros Sooniecher in 1944 with the original intend to create a all-around safe and impenetrable bunker to use as a hide-out from the results of World War II. In 1950 Sooniecher purchased an abandoned Gypsum Plant known as "Seegrotte" (ger. Sea-grotto) in Hinterbühl, lower Austria, which he intended to use as a secret storage for legal-sensetive chemicals and documents until a more suitable place could be found. The storage proofed difficult as the gypsum plant is composed mostly of a over 6000 square meter large sea, fed by seven wells. In order to keep the sea at a manageable level, a pump system had to be installed, feeding 5 Million liters of water daily into the nearby Mödling river. Founding and early years (1951-1970) As Cold war fears spread, Sooniecher saw a business oppurtunity in protecting corperate information from nuclear attacks and other disasters. In 1951 the company christend as "Stahlberg Schutz- und Lagerstätte Institution" (ger. "Steel-Mountain Safety- and Storage Corporation") and opend it's first underground vaults. Stahlberg's first customer was East River Savings Bank, who brought microfilm copies of deposit records and duplicate signature cards in armored cars for storage in the cave facility. In 1978, the company opened its first above-ground records-storage facility. Middle Years (1970-2000) The first literation of Stahlberg was bankrupt by early 1972 due to the lack of potentional customers and the relatively high cost of maintainnance of vault storage equipment caused by the high humidity levels and difficult to maintain water levels of the cave. The company was wholly aquired by Sparkasse Banks through it's holdings in lower Austria. At the time it consisted of it's original facility in Hinterbühl as well as Langau-Riegersburg, a charcoal plant in lower Austria. In 1980, it expanded abroad to Rhode Island through the purchase of a former Industrial National Bank (a precursor to FleetBoston) cold site and data tape repository in Glocester, Rhode Island. Though it had many Fortune 500 clients at the time, its revenue was in the $6 million range in the early 1980s. Its breakthrough came in the mid-1980s when it convinced Manufacturer's Hanover Bank to move all its paper records out of Manhattan to the aforementioned above-ground facility, a former strip mall in Port Ewen, New York. This was the first time bar codes were used by a records management company to allow real time access to shipped boxes, and therefore, the documents inside. The barcoding of boxes of paper records made expansion easy from there on out. Its "sell or be put out of business" mindset was instrumental to the firm's growth. In 1997, Sooniecher, still the largest shareholder of the company re-aquired Stahlberg. Under his now close observation it became a leading software escrow company with the acquisition of Data Securities International (DSI) Expansion and consolation (2000-present) Since 1980, Stahlberg grew through acquisitions. Revenue over this period increased from €3 million in 1981 to €3.9 billion at the end of 2007. In February 2000 Stahlberg incorporated sold its devisions in Glocester and Langau-Riegersburg to finance a massive structural upgrade in the facility. The main chamber was dried off by draining it's feeding wells into the nearby river. This however caused a massive increase in the rivers flow, soon flooding part of the flatlands and threatening to destroy framlands build across. Landlords filed a lawsuit against the company, resulting in a shift of plans. The lake was set deeper underground by digging a series of narrow chambers under the bassin and blasting them out, resulting in the lakes bassin dropping by over a 100m. The resulting cave-in was transformed into a massive concrete cylinder, measuring 300 meters in diameter. Vaults were arranged around the cylinder to hause servers, machines, security systems and offices. The project was finished in 2004 and had an extaminated cost of €14,3 billion. In February 2005 the first fully-automated robot system was installed to access deep-undergraund vaults that were implemented in the water bassin below the underground facility. It was created to prevent any potential intruders from accessing the storage goods manually and provide more advanced security for critical loot. By September 2008 Stahlberg underwent another expansion, creating a hermetically sealed off section that would be used to store biological materials and samples. Sooniecher himself is making heavy use of the lowest chambers, built over 200 meters deep underground to store his collection of extinct-species DNA samples. Recogntion Security Magazine named Stahlberg in “Security 500” of 2008, an annual ranking of the world-wide 500 most secure companies. Stahlberg was its industry’s sole representative in the category of business services. Published in the magazine’s November issue, the Security 500 ranks companies using several metrics such as the percentage of a company’s revenue spent on security. The survey tracks 16 vertical markets to serve as a benchmarking tool for companies. Fortune magazine has had Stahlberg on its list of the “World’s Most Admired Companies” every year from 2006 to 2011. In its category, "diversified outsourcing services", it has every year come in second behind Aramark. The only exception was 2006, when it also ranked below Convergys. The industry rankings reflect feedback from executives, directors, and analysts who rated Stahlberg and industry peers on nine attributes of reputation, from investment value to quality of management. In April 2009, Stahlberg's DigiIMG (a Digital Record Center for Images) was recognized as a "Product of the Year" by the Massachusetts Network Communications Council in the "Cloud Computing, Virtualization and Data Warehousing/Storage category". The company also recived negative feedback however, from various sources such as the European Parlament, FBI and the Defence Contract Management Agency (DCMA), on the base of various claims such as storing, hosting and publishing illegal data, providing safe heavens for websites of Terrorist and other illegal groups and threatening the safety of the united states by refusing to delete critical data fed into their systems. In Novemeber 2010, the European financial concress filed a lawsuit against Stahlber inc., for supposed tax evasion when purchasing building materials for non-listed construction inside the company. The lawsuit however was dropped as the Judges did not find presented evidience grounds enough to file a search warrant against Stahlberg.